Mitigation of noise in a network, such as noise resulting from upstream ingress signals, can be resource intensive and inefficient, particularly when the network employs a bounded medium, such as one utilizing optical fiber and/or coaxial cable or other constructs to non-wirelessly bind signaling over a constrained infrastructure. The bounded medium may require technicians to perform some variant of a manual search or leverage personal history with a segment of the network to identify a source of an ingress issue in what may be essentially a trial and error process of physically inspecting different portions of the bounded medium. The imprecise nature of relying on technicians to troubleshoot noise in such a manner can result in a significant percentage of truck roll hours being spent in a search process where the technicians hunt for noises according hunches, experience and guesswork, often with the technicians having to physically and laboriously disconnect or isolate portions of the network to check on its association with the noise. The technician time lost hunting for the noise can be expensive and the downtime associated with disconnecting portions of the network can impair or disrupt services for customers.
The challenges of detecting noise can vary depending on the number of legs, connections or other signaling paths within the infrastructure of a network. In hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) plants and other such networks, optical to electrical nodes may have two, four or more input/output coax taps, ports, legs, etc. within different portions/segments of the network arranged in a tree-branch structure forming any number of signaling paths. The signaling paths may be associated with one or more branches served by a set of cable modem termination system (CMTS) upstream ports or other connections associated with a termination point/device in the network whereat signals for multiple paths may converge. Signals and noise from each tap, port or other access point to the network can sum together when traveling to the point of convergence in a process referred to as noise funneling. Noise funneling can present particular challenges in isolating the portion(s) of the noise coming from certain taps, branches, legs or other sources or signaling paths within the network due to difficulties in apportioning the noise to particular sources after the signals carrying the noise have been summed as part of the infrastructural funneling.
One non-limiting aspect of the present invention contemplates ameliorating the guesswork and customer disruption in identifying sources of noise in a network, including doing so when the sources of noise may be obfuscated due to a network infrastructure causing noise funneling at a CMTS, termination point/device or other confluence or convergence.